So since the media just won’t give up on the Tiger Woods saga, they might as well talk about something relevant to society.

This was written in a recent article on Poynter’s site : Why is this a news story? To borrow some of Mel Mencher’s categories, it is timely  and offers elements of conflict, prominence, currency and the bizarre. More than that, though, are the larger cultural questions that many of us are chatting about, including marital relations, sex, money, forgiveness, violence, gender, race, celebrity and much more.

Since this is obviously what people want to hear about right now, (read the beginning of the Poynter article), why not actually make it newsworthy? Why not make the Tiger story applicable to the general society? Not simply a story about the next mistress who comes out saying she too had an affair with Tiger. Today on network news (FOX Good Day, NBC10 news at 4, ABC news at 6) that’s what the story was.

But today I also read an article (which I found on ABCNews.com under an ‘Around the Web’ tab) done by a new site called Sphere–which claims to be an evolution of AOL News with writers from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today among others. It was about how easy it is for cheaters (like Tiger) to leave tracks and inevitably get caught in a digital age. So there’s relevance in that there’s a little bit of self-help advice (joke), it talks about the current hot topic (Tiger) and there’s information about the increase and prevalence of infidelity due to technology in the U.S.

I’m sure there are more articles like this one out there, but I’d like to see a story like this on television–perhaps there has been and I just haven’t seen it. But I think stories like this are a good solution, or middle ground, if you will for the media. They would still be talking about what people want to hear, but they would be doing so in a way that can affect society. Sure, it’s not as important as health care reform, but I’m a firm believer in baby steps. You can’t change the whole field at once.

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